The present invention relates generally to query techniques, and more particularly, to query techniques for detecting top-K simple shortest paths in a graph.
Large scale graph data is widely represented in problems in scientific and engineering disciplines. For example, the problems of shortest path and top-K shortest paths appear in the context of finding connections between friends, tracing money routes, linking seemingly disconnected criminal activities, etc. These problems have applications in a variety of fields, including large scale networks such as the world wide web and online social networks, which pose challenges in managing and querying graph data formulated as interactions between people, servers and entities.